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Out of thin air

On a desert planet in a galaxy far, far away, the land is hot, dry and devoid of any large bodies of surface water. It is a parched world, desolate in that way only a planet illuminated by a pair of binary stars can be. Fantastical, yes; a pop-culture icon, also yes.

Listen to the Deep Dive

But there are two reasons to start with a description of Tatooine, the desert planet that appears in the Star Wars franchise: The technology seen here has become a reality, and we can test it in the real-world places that inspired the fictional landscape.

We’re talking moisture farming.

The moisture vaporators, also known as vapor spires in the Star Wars lingo, are devices used on Tatooine moisture farms to capture water from the atmosphere. Tall and slender, they were stationed at ground level and used refrigerated condensers to pull water from the air around them. Captured water was then pumped or gravity-directed into a storage cistern. These devices could collect 1.5 liters of water every day, even when the relative humidity of the air was only 1.5 percent. An amazing idea, and now becoming real as new technologies and materials emerge to harvest previously untappable water from the atmosphere.

The basic concept is simple. If you take an ice-cold glass of water outside on a hot day, you’ll quickly notice water droplets forming on the outside of the glass. If you cool warm, humid air, it loses its capacity to maintain its water content and you can produce and collect condensation, whether it’s on the outside of your glass or in a moisture vaporator straight out of science-fiction.

Rather than waiting for the rain, bring the rain to you

When clean drinking water comes out of the tap at home, it’s easy to think that it will always be plentiful, but fresh water is actually incredibly rare. Only 3 percent of the world’s water is potable, and two-thirds of that is stored away, frozen in glaciers, or otherwise unavailable for our use.

IMAGE: AI; KUST Review
Do not eat this packet

Almost everyone has bought something and found a packet of silica gel beads placed inside to absorb moisture while items are waiting to make their way to the customer. Read more›››

Silica is commercially available, inexpensive and a highly effective desiccant.

Silica can also be also used in water production via the conventional condensation approach.

Silica gel is one of the most commonly used materials in moisture harvesting, and Lisa Klein, professor of materials science and engineering at Rutgers University, has investigated using patterns on silica gel to facilitate water-droplet formation.

She conducted a series of experiments to condense water vapor on the hydrophilic pattern of silica gels. Although the pattern was hydrophilic, the gel itself was hydrophobic so the water droplets slide down the surface and collect in a container rather than absorb into the gel. This represents another potential area of investigation for harvesting water from the atmosphere. ‹‹‹ Read less

As a result, more than 1 billion people worldwide lack access to clean water year-round. Global warming may be melting those glaciers, but as humans continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, weather and water patterns will change, combining to make less water available for people around the world. By 2025, predicts the World Wildlife Fund, two-thirds of the world’s population may be facing water shortages.

Technologies such as filtration, desalination and solar purification have been developed to use seawater or wastewater. However, because they depend on terrestrial water sources, these technologies are feasible only in coastal areas. Atmospheric water, however, is present everywhere, and the global water cycle enables a sustainable supply of water to the air, providing a resource equivalent to about 10 percent of all the fresh waterin lakes on Earth.

At 100 percent humidity, the air at 40 degrees Celsius contains about 51 milliliters of water per cubic meter of air. For the same humidity at 10 degrees Celsius, the air contains only 9.3 milliliters. Bring that 40-degree air down to 10 degrees and you should be able to extract that water difference. Scale that up and you could produce an awful lot of water on one of those sticky, hot Arabian Peninsula days.

Technologies already exist to catch fog or collect dew that condenses overnight, but pulling water directly from the air, without consuming lots of electricity, is still under development. Still, Ruzhu Wang, professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says atmospheric water harvesting is accessible everywhere and can be easily co-operated with a renewable energy source for local needs.

The problem, Wang writes in Joule, is that there are few commercial water-harvesting systems available.

But when those systems do become available?

“In general, any viable atmospheric water-harvesting technology must satisfy five primary criteria: It should be efficient, cheap, scalable, wide-band and stable enough to operate for a whole year or at least a monsoon season,” Wang writes.

None of the existing commercial atmospheric-water generators meets all five criteria. Wang says this is mainly due to the energy inefficiency of the process.

So, the ideal moisture harvester has a high water uptake, low-energy demand for water release, fast water capture/release cycling, high cycling stability and a low cost — a tall order but one that could be achieved with advances in material science.

Large-scale moisture farming is science-fiction today. But it may someday bring clean water to desert cities. CREDIT: AI; KUST Review

Living in a material world

Atmospheric water harvesting based on moisture harvesters captures vapor from the air via adsorption, where water molecules adhere to the surface of a material through chemical or physical interactions.

Researchers are looking at materials such as hydrogels and zeolites, as well as porous materials similar to this AI-generated image. IMAGE: AI; KUST Review

For chemical adsorption, the surface needs to adsorb water through strong chemical bonding; releasing the water requires a large energy supply.

Physical adsorption needs pores in the surface, where water molecules can pool and collect. Energy is still required to release the water, but at a significantly lower rate than chemical adsorption.

Porous materials capture the water from the atmosphere, but said pores need to be perfect; you can’t just place a sponge in the desert and expect water to collect.

Enter the metal-organic framework (MOF): a network of metal and organic materials that can easily trap water vapor, which is then released using energy captured from the sun.

Water load of options

But MOFs aren’t the only material vying for a slice of the water-harvesting pie: hydrogels and zeolites have also entered the ring.MOFs work great in areas with lower humidity, but they have a finite number of pores. Fill those, and your harvesting device stalls until they can be emptied.

CREDIT: AI; KUST Review
Combining the two: Fog and moisture farming

The United Arab Emirates has all the necessary ingredients for fog as dry desert conditions exist next to the warm seas of the Arabian Gulf, with moist air carried inland by the afternoon sea breeze cooled by the night desert surface. Read more›››

Tendrils of fog snake their way through the dunes in the early morning and could be captured by the fog-farming technologies already available. At the same time, the humidity that plagues the region during the hot months makes atmospheric-water generation viable.

Combining both approaches could reduce dependency on desalination and provide clean water for the many farms found far out in the desert.‹‹‹ Read less

Hydrogels, on the other hand, can expand to hold more water. The soft, pliable and thin material that makes up more than 90 percent of contact lenses prescribed in the United States is a hydrogel: a water-swollen polymeric material that maintains a 3D structure.

The 3D network of hydrophilic polymers can swell in water while maintaining its structure and is tunable, dynamic, biodegradable and, most importantly, capable of encapsulating huge amounts of water.

Let’s just use hydrogels, then. Well, they’re not the best in low-humidity areas — they like it muggy outside.

Although they may not be suited to the deserts of the Middle East, there are plenty of places with high humidity that are also water-stressed. Lima, Peru, is one such place.

Just south of Lima is the village of Bujama. Despite being in an area where air humidity reaches 98 percent, Bujama is almost a desert, and its people live in tough conditions with little access to clean water.

Researchers from the University of Engineering and Technology in Lima installed panels in advertising billboards that trap the humidity and transform it into drinking water for the people on the ground. These panels comprise filters and condensers and produced 96 liters of water a day in 2013.

People here may already have one solution to water scarcity, but that doesn’t mean hydrogels couldn’t also work in Bujama.

Zeolites are often considered “molecular sieves” as they can selectively sort molecules based primarily on a size-exclusive process. They are easy to manufacture and have a large internal surface area full of pores to adsorb the tiny quantities of water held in desert air — another contender for the low-humidity application.

Water is running out and we know that desalination is not the solution. It’s not just drinking water, it’s all the water used in industry, in agriculture.

– Michael Rutman, co-CEO of Watergen

Desert countries especially would benefit from atmospheric water harvesting. CREDIT: AI; KUST Review

The zeolite can collect water vapor overnight, and heat from the sun can then be used to extract the water for use. However, compared to MOFs and hydrogels, the water capacity of zeolites is relatively low, and releasing the water requires a high energy consumption that, even when supplied by solar power, make zeolites a less efficient option.

In areas where water scarcity is a problem — and climate change is putting more areas at risk — it’s important to consider different technologies and approaches.

Condensing the problem

The billboard in Bujama is just one example of the condenser approach. Michael Rutman is co-CEO of Watergen, a company creating drinking water from air. Based in Israel, “which has a very similar climate to the UAE,” Watergen uses a system involving food-grade polymer condensers and filters to draw water out of the air around us.

“Adsorption can only generate so much water,” Rutman explains. “It also requires a much larger resource footprint than condensation, and much more energy. Metal-organic frameworks that don’t need quite so much energy input to draw the water out are under development, but the metal part of a MOF should also be a concern.”

Atmospheric water is everywhere. The trick is finding energy- and cost-efficient ways to tap it. IMAGE: AI; KUST Review

Rutman points out that an air conditioning unit does much the same thing as a Watergen condensing system: pull warm air out of the environment and cool it, producing water as a by-product. However, the heat exchanger material in an AC unit is usually made of metal, and that metal leeches into the resulting water.

“That’s why you don’t drink from your AC,” Rutman says, laughing. “An AC unit produces tons of water, but that water is contaminated with heavy metals. The Watergen systems use food-grade polymers in the heat-exchanger technology, so the water produced is immediately potable, but we also add minerals to further improve the quality.”

Watergen didn’t set out to save the world from its water problem; the company started by trying to make dehumidifiers more efficient and less power-hungry.

It was Michael Mirilashvili, an Israeli-Georgian businessman, who declared they were wasting this technology. Now president of Watergen, Mirilashvili realized these highly efficient polymers could be used to solve the world’s biggest problem and spent the past five years pivoting the company to producing water from the air for everyone.

Their system works, too. It works in areas of high humidity, such as Colombia and South Africa, but it also works in the driest of places, like Arizona in the U.S., where the average relative humidity is 38.5 percent.

Rutman says he believes mass use of atmospheric water generation is the future.

RELATED: Solar-powered plants could help achieve global water security 

“Water is running out and we know that desalination is not the solution. It’s not just drinking water, it’s all the water used in industry, in agriculture. It can take 160 liters of water to make a pair of jeans, and 60 liters for a loaf of bread. All this water can be replaced by water produced from the air. I believe we’re less than ten years away from this point. Our pilot technology works, and it’ll work everywhere.”

Perhaps a tabletop box like this will some day supply drinking water for an average home. CREDIT: AI; KUST Review

Speaking of everywhere, we should also start thinking about portability.

Conventional water supply starts with a large centralized plant that distributes water to the population, but if a device were small enough to incorporate into a home, gaps in water supply could be plugged.

Make them even smaller and they could travel to all sorts of now-uninhabitable regions: the middle of the desert, the polar extremes, Mars?

Back down to Earth

Understandably, research institutes in the Middle East are particularly invested in this new type of technology. Many of the projects showing promise in the U.S. were funded by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, including projects designed by Omar Yaghi, pioneer in the MOF space, and his teams.

Similar technology is behind an industry-funded project at Masdar City, a hub for sustainability research and innovation in the MENA, with whom Khalifa University does research.

“As freshwater scarcity is becoming a global challenge, a promising route to overcoming water shortage is to extract water from air with innovative atmospheric water production (AWG) technologies,” says Samuel Mao, director of Masdar Institute at Khalifa University. “KU’s research team at Masdar Institute is performing comprehensive assessment of different AWG approaches, and developing advanced technologies to enable water extraction from air with better energy efficiency and lower cost.”

Almost half of all people on Earth live in water-threatened conditions, with demand growing drastically, while supply remains constant, according to the World Health Organization.

The United Nations recognizes that access to clean water and sanitation is at the core of sustainable development, and ensuring access requires innovation. Atmospheric water generation could be the solution, and it’s already here.

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The next generation of face masks
might diagnose disease as well

People around the world wore masks in their daily lives during the pandemic to help prevent infection. Now, a new kind of mask might help diagnose illness.

Engineers from MIT and Harvard say their new prototype can produce a COVID-19 test result in 90 minutes.

The wearer breathes normally into the mask, and droplets produced by exhaling and coughing collect on a pad. The wearer then presses a button to activate the test. A small bit of water is released, flowing through the pad and rehydrating freeze-dried cells that react to the presence of coronavirus markers.

After about 90 minutes, a colored line indicates whether the result is positive or negative. It looks like a pregnancy test.

The team uses a typical N95 mask and the results were published in Nature Biotechnology. This technology had been developed to detect other viruses such as Ebola. The MIT and Harvard teams have further plans for the technology.

CAPTION: The team uses a typical N95 mask.

“We’ve demonstrated that we can freeze-dry a broad range of synthetic biology sensors to detect viral or bacterial nucleic acids, as well as toxic chemicals, including nerve toxins. We envision that this platform could enable next-generation wearable biosensors for first responders, health-care personnel and military personnel,” MIT researcher James Collins tells  MIT news. 

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Wearable tech helps protect
workers from heat stroke

Between 1992 and 2017, 815 American workers died and another 70,000 were seriously injured from heat stress, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But new wearable tech could make laboring outdoors much safer.

American company Kenzen developed a device that attaches to a strap a worker can wear on the upper arm, similar to one a runner might use to carry a phone. It measures the wearer’s core body temperature; heart rate; how much the worker sweats; and level of activity. The device indicates in real time if the wearer is in danger of heat stroke and is used as a preventative tool.

A signal sent to the wearer and any nearby health and safety managers indicates the worker needs a break. The detailed health information, however, is sent to only the wearer in order to maintain privacy. The data is stored in the cloud so companies can analyze patterns and adapt work schedules.

UAE-based Emirates Global Aluminium ran a trial on the device with 50 employees in summer 2022, CNN reports.

Without these factors in place, wearable technology on its own cannot eliminate the risk of heat-related illness for people working outside.

– Salman Abdulla, Emirates Global Aluminium

Salman Abdulla. CREDIT: Emirates Global Aluminium

Though the data from the trial is still in review, the metal producer reports that the device did well maintaining connectivity in difficult areas and fared well in terms of comfort. Additionally, they were able to identify increases in susceptibility to heat-related illnesses at the end of the day and if the wearer was fatigued prior to beginning a shift.

The company managed zero heat-related illnesses so far in 2022 and will continue to examine what role the device played in this result. The first year without heat-related incidents for the company was 2019. Emirates Global Aluminium is the largest industrial company in the UAE outside of the oil and gas sector.

“This is complementary to the decades of work we have done on heat-stress, which focuses on providing workers with knowledge to actively care for themselves and others around them, empowering them to take action when they have a concern, and providing the tools and resources they need to take that action. Without these factors in place, wearable technology on its own cannot eliminate the risk of heat-related illness for people working outside,” Salman Abdulla, the company’s executive vice president for environment, health, safety and sustainability, tells KUST Review.

Wearable safety technology includes smart helmets, smart footwear, exoskeletons and smart safety vests.

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A non-fungible
token of good faith

The internet is full of funny images, including cartoon images of animals by digital artists from all over the world. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is one such group producing digital cartoons of apes in hats. They’re entertaining; they’re cute; and one sold for USD 3.4 million last year.

These monkey pictures are examples of NFTs: non-fungible tokens. To explain NFTs, let’s start with the concept of fungibility. Fungible assets are goods that can be readily interchanged for another of the same thing: a dollar bill is a dollar bill, regardless of its serial number.

That dollar bill is also four quarters or ten dimes, and so on. Its value remains the same. Stock operates in much the same way: One share of a company’s stock is worth the same as any other share of that same company. It doesn’t matter which one you personally own: The stocks are designed to be equivalent and interchangeable.

Go to any bookstore and buy a copy of any mass-market paperback. You now have a fungible copy of that text. But if you choose a first edition or a limited cover, things start to shift.

Now, you have something of a limited run, and its value often increases because of that. People may pay a premium to get that unique cover or the historical first edition: The book hasn’t actually got more to offer as a first edition. It’s generally the same text that you’d find in the mass-market paperback.

Bringing it back to art, you could purchase a print of one of Monet’s Water Lilies series for your wall; you could even print an image from the internet and hang that.

But an original Water Lilies piece costs so much more than a printer-paper copy or even the most skilled reproduction. You’re not just paying for the image, you’re paying for the history and the provenance, for the fact that it’s a Monet, an original.

Anything can be an NFT. The NFT isn’t a digital image itself, but the receipt that shows that you own it. A blockchain record verifies the purchase.

If you want your item to be valuable, you often want it to be non-fungible. For physical items, non-fungibility makes sense. Certain things hold greater value than others even if they are fundamentally the same thing. Digital media, however, is infinitely reproducible.

My eBook copy of the mass-market paperback is identical to your copy, right down to the ones and the zeros. How can you have a collector’s edition of those ones and zeros? How can you have something special when creating an exact copy is as simple as Ctrl+C?

ENTER THE BLOCKCHAIN

Blockchain is the technology that’ll be powering everything, that new system we’ve all heard of yet barely anyone actually understands. Blockchain offers an immutable and tamper-proof ledger, where each record created forms a block, and each block is confirmed by the community among which the platform is shared before it can be paired up with the previous entry in the chain.

The blockchain is a shared database, validated by a wider community rather than a central authority, making it a public ledger that cannot be easily tampered with, as no one person can go back and change things.
If you purchase an NFT, you are the sole owner, and this fact is protected by the blockchain. No one can modify the record of ownership, and no one can copy/paste a new one into existence.

Smart contracts assign ownership and manage the transfer of NFTs. When someone creates an NFT, they execute code stored in the smart contracts that conform to different standards, with this information added to the blockchain to be tamper-free forever.

It’s not hard to imagine a world where your Ethereum wallet becomes the key to your car or home.

Instead of a physical limited-edition copy of your favorite novel, your NFT is a token that says: “I bought one of only 500 limited-edition versions of this, and no matter how many times the piece is copied, there will only ever be 500 of these tokens.” It’s digital copyright; it’s digital bragging rights. Sure, you have a piece of work by Monet, but do you have a Monet? Sure, you have a piece of digital art, but do you have an NFT?

Think of an NFT as a template. Although 2021 saw digital art sweep the mainstream, anything can be an NFT. The NFT isn’t the asset itself, but a unit of data (or a digital asset) on the blockchain that confirms and represents ownership of the asset, whether that is digital or physical.

If you’re purchasing a piece of digital art that has been listed as an NFT, the NFT is the string of numbers on the blockchain that says, “Yes, you own this now.” It’s like a digital receipt that no one can argue with.

An NFT could represent digital art, from GIFs to videos, and real-world items such as the deeds to a house, legal documents, tickets to a real-life event and so on. As the Ethereum website says, “It’s not hard to imagine a world where your Ethereum wallet becomes the key to your car or home — your door being unlocked by the cryptographic proof of ownership.”

WHERE IS THE MONEY?

As with any good where only a limited number exist, you can often expect its value to increase over time. Bragging rights command a high price. The NFTs created by Bored Ape Yacht Club, a team of developers who created the 10,000 Bored Apes sitting in the digital repositories of such celebrities as Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon, also serve as tickets to an exclusive social club. And they’re all sold out.

At the same time, there’s money to be made anywhere people are willing to pay for something.

Some people want to support their favorite creators by buying a “premium” version of a piece. Some people just want to own a piece of digital art.

There’s also the concept of royalties, which is new to this marketplace, but powerful. Some NFTs have smart contracts that will automatically pay out royalties to their creators when they’re sold.

As their work is sold from person to person — as that NFT changes hands — creators can earn royalties automatically.

And the potential for those royalties could be rapidly growing. Andrea Baronchelli, reader of mathematics at City University of London, reports on what he describes as the “NFT revolution.”

Some NFTs have language built into the smart contract that automatically pays out royalties to the NFT creators when the asset is resold.

He investigated data concerning 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs between June 23, 2017, and April 27, 2021, and says the NFT market experienced a 150-fold growth in just eight months at the end of 2020 and into 2021.

“Following an initial rapid growth in late 2017, when the CryptoKitties collection gained worldwide popularity, the size of the NFT market remained substantially stable until mid 2020, with an average of around USD 60,000 traded daily,” Baronchelli says. “Starting in July 2020, the market experienced dramatic growth, with the total volume exchanged daily surpassing USD 10 million in March 2021.”

How valuable is an NFT, really? Usman Chohan, economist at the University of New South Wales, says an NFT is just “as valuable as people express a willingness to pay for it.”

Same as anything, then.

IT’S NOT PERFECT — YET

The blockchain itself is immutable; your information and your assets are safe when they’re on there. But with multiple NFT marketplaces and multiple individual blockchains, it’s feasible to screenshot an NFT from one platform and list it as something brand new and unique on a different platform.

Once it’s on that blockchain, have fun trying to delete it. Ultimately here, the fungibility applies to the specific blockchain instance of the thing, not the thing itself.

Chohan says this is part of what raises eyebrows among casual observers of NFT markets. “Anyone could, in theory, upload artwork onto an NFT, without proving that they are the original creator of the work,” he says. “This creates an evident real-world risk that fraudulent actors will upload NFTs to auction markets by posing as the original owners, or creators, of objects of value.”

“In theory,” he continues, “there can be multiple NFTs created over an asset, claiming to be the ‘true’ token representing an idea, image or object.”
There are contracts that can help mitigate this. If you want to buy an NFT, you can ask a smart contract to run a ”node,” a piece of software that checks everything on a blockchain for fakes. This contract needs to be smart enough to find fakes, but if it does, you’ll realize the NFT is a copy and you can pull out of the purchase.

The whole system works because blockchain technology is decentralized and secure, but this comes at a cost. It takes a lot of computing power to create new blocks in the blockchain, and blocks are created constantly to keep everything tamper-proof. Even if blocks aren’t storing new data, the more blocks, the more secure the chain.

The computing power to run NFT exchanges can be energy-intensive. Each new block in the blockchain required to prevent tampering with the record requires uninterrupted computer power.

However, this means that uninterrupted computing power is required and that is energy-intensive, to say the least. According to the New York Times, mining bitcoin uses more electricity than some countries.

“The process of creating bitcoin to spend or trade consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than is used by Finland,” the paper reports. Blockchain companies like Ethereum are committing to making the process greener, but it’s likely that blockchain technology’s energy consumption will remain volatile.

THE ‘ART’ IN FRAUD ARTIST

Nothing is immune from exploitation and NFTs are no different. For those looking to launder money, the art world has long been a draw: Art typically commands a high price, and the industry allows large cash deals.

Many valuable artworks are housed in ”freeports,” high-security storage spaces for safekeeping. They are auctioned and purchased using dirty money, then anonymously sold on without ever leaving their place in the freeport. The new buyer can retrieve their new artwork from the same freeport, and the original buyer, turned seller, has money from a seemingly legitimate business deal. NFTs could make this even easier.

There is nothing stopping you listing any asset as an NFT for huge amounts of money. An anonymous user who totally isn’t you then buys that NFT, and you receive some nice clean cryptocurrency. The anonymity of the whole affair is the key here: When your government wants to know where you got all your money, you can point to the transaction where an anonymous user paid for your NFT.

IT’S ALL A BIT TENUOUS

When you buy an NFT, you buy the certificate of authenticity that proves you own the NFT, not the thing itself, and a link pointing to that thing. That thing could be the original image, that Bored Ape you’ve wanted for so long.

But that link is only as good as the service keeping that link active. It’s all very fragile and maintains value only as long as the people using it insist it has value. But then, that’s how all money works, really.

As Baronchelli points out: “The NFT market is less than four years old. Overall, NFTs are a new tool that satisfies some of the needs of creators, users and collectors of a large class of digital and non-digital objects.

Have you bought THE Mona Lisa or A Mona Lisa? The value of your asset often depends on the exclusivity of the purchase.

As such, they are probably here to stay or, at least, they represent a first step towards new tools to deal with property and provenance of such assets.” Ultimately, NFTs are a way to emulate physical uniqueness for digital assets. Even if there are a million other identical copies out there, the NFT says that you own the original one.

This is all secured using blockchain technology, which is the same method that digital currencies use to ensure that you can’t make a million copies of your bitcoin.

There are countless copies of the Mona Lisa out there, but there’s only one Mona Lisa.

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What’s chaining blockchain?

What’s chaining blockchain?

Blockchain might be the most hyped technology relatively few people understand or actively use.

Its earliest and perhaps most famous use – the cryptocurrency bitcoin – has become a household word, with other digital-currency companies such as Ethereum and Cardano gaining traction in the public consciousness and with investors.

Despite wild price volatility and scams that the United States’ Federal Trade Commission says cost 7,000 people more than US $80 million between October 2020 and March 31, 2021, the crypto economy keeps rolling along, with market capitalization topping $2.4 trillion in May 2021, up from around $200 billion in 2019. And according to a 2021 Fidelity study, seven in 10 institutional investors expect to buy or invest in digital assets in the future.

But financial applications are just part of the hyped potential for blockchain. Boosters of the technology point to other uses such as securing medical data, tracking supply chains, facilitating votes and protecting personal-identity security.

Blockchain, however, still faces hurdles before it can be the game-changer it’s been promising to be since the 2009 debut of bitcoin.

Terms you should know

Hash: The function that meets the encrypted demands needed to solve for a blockchain computation. Read more›››

Non-fungible token (NFT): A unique bit of data stored on a digital ledger that can be sold or traded. It can be a photo, a video or any kind of digital file. Companies such as Nike, Walt Disney, Warner Bros., the NBA and Coca-Cola are issuing NFTs.

Nodes: The computers that make up the blockchain network. They store and update records of each transaction in real time.

Smart contract: A signed, unalterable digital agreement stored on blockchain.

Token: Unit of value that can be acquired through blockchain.

Wallet: A digital wallet that lets users store or transfer digital currencies.

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC): A digital currency issued on a blockchain/distributed ledger technology (DLT). Governments across the globe are running pilot projects using CBDCs. A 2021 Banks for International Settlements survey found that 86 percent of the central banks worldwide are conducting research on CBDCs.‹‹‹ Read less

  But first: What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a platform to store and transfer information in a way that is virtually impossible to change without other users knowing. It is secure because it is decentralized and its content is hashed. Users issue transactions to a public ledger that is managed and verified by a network of computers (called miners) without a third party such as a government, bank or other institutional intermediary getting involved.

A group of verified transactions is called a block, and the blocks are linked by complex puzzles solved by computers(“miners”) which verify the transaction and are rewarded for their efforts. Any retroactive change to the log invalidates each block that follows. The result is a certified, transparent, decentralized, tamper-proof database or ledger.

  Do we really need it, though?

There are difficulties on the way to blockchain world domination, however.

Perhaps the first hurdle to the Age of Blockchain, as Jesse Frederik of the Correspondent asked in 2020, is whether blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. In other words, are the problems expected to be addressed by blockchain projects better suited to solutions we already have?

But hold up, says Dragan Boscovic, research professor and co-director of the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. Blockchain may need to evolve and improve, but it’s viable, solves real-world problems and is on a well-trod path to large-scale adoption.

”It is rather a common technology evolution, the same way you would upgrade from your iPhone 11 to iPhone 12 or 13,” Boscovic tells KUST Review. “There are numerous examples of blockchain technology being deployed to solve practical problems: One example is the (IBM) Food Trust solution for the food-supply chain.” (See sidebar.)

Also, says Dr. Ramesh Ramadoss, co-chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ Blockchain Initiative, it’s important to note that “blockchain” isn’t a monolith. It refers to a collection of various distributed ledger architectures. “Different architectures are used in different applications,” he tells KUST Review, “so, it’s very challenging to make a general statement about the actual usage or maturity level of the field.”

  An energy glutton

Another issue is that blockchain can have a heavy carbon footprint.

According to the Harvard Business Review, Bitcoin alone consumes around 110 terawatt hours per year – 0.55 percent of the world’s energy production. Together, Ethereum and Bitcoin annually eat up the same amount of energy as the residents of Belgium and Thailand, respectively, Digiconomist’s Ethereum Energy Consumption Index reports.

And each Bitcoin transaction, regardless of how big or small, represents $176 in electricity to power the mining, according to UK financial site MoneySuperMarket.

SOURCE: Digiconomist, World Population Review. DESIGN: Anas Albounni, KUST Review

The technology needs the resources, but the industry is already beginning to correct itself, Boscovic says, noting “Ethereum 2.0,” which completed its long-awaited merge in September 2022. The initiative promises to reduce its energy usage by 99 percent and be “more scalable, more secure and more sustainable.”

And energy consumption for private blockchains, however, is generally not an issue, Ramadoss notes.

Still, “blockchain by its design needs to have access to a large pool of distributed resources,” ASU’s Boscovic adds. “It is from there that it is able to extract value by enabling independent validation and real-time auditing of the transactions enacted across these resources. Initial blockchain solutions made great strides in improving their scalability and throughput (e.g. speed of transaction) as well as energy efficiency. Cardano network is (another) example of new blockchain design that scales well and exhibits great energy efficiency.”

Most people think finance first when they consider the applications of blockchain. But here are seven examples of real-world uses you might not have expected. Read more›››

Food safety: The United Nations estimates that 1.4 billion tons of food are wasted every year because of supply-chain inefficiencies. The IBM Food Trust looks to change that – and control other issues, including food safety, sustainability and fraud – with its blockchain program to help supply-chain users better communicate

Avoiding spam calls: India’s telecom authority insisted that providers use digital ledger technology to solve the problem of spam calls and texts to its more than 500 million mobile-phone customers. The result? Tech Mahindra created Hyperledger Fabric, which works with all of the service providers in India to manage unwanted calls.

Entertainment: Mediachain, which was bought by Spotify in 2017, is another use of smart contracts, helping musicians agree to rates and get paid.

Health care: BurstIQ’s smart contracts help patients and doctors manage the transfer of sensitive identity information and data. Other blockchain-based systems for medical record-keeping and communication include Patientory, Immunity.Life and Medicalchain.

Marriage: Rebecca Rose and Peter Kacherginsky in April 2021 used Ethereum’s blockchain to get married. The couple, both employees of crypto-based exchange Coinbase, wrote a smart contract and exchanged “rings,” non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the animated form of two circles merging into one.
The digital marriage was performed in conjunction with a traditional Jewish ceremony when the couple used their phones to exchange the tokens. The couple named their tokens Tabaat – the Hebrew word for ring.

Human rights: Coca-Cola, along with the US State Department and several crypto companies, is working on a plan to let workers use blockchain technology to report cases of forced labor. The initiative was announced after the Know the Chain study in 2019 found that many food and beverage companies failed to address the issue of labor abuses in their supply chains.

Tracking vaccines: With the Covid pandemic bringing vaccines and vaccine safety to the forefront of the world’s attention, IBM (again) is stepping up with a project aimed to make sure vaccines are trustworthy and distributed efficiently. IBM promises that its distribution network will ensure speed, transparency and accountability as well as the ability to monitor for adverse events and facilitate quick recalls, if needed.‹‹‹ Read less

  Out of the shadows

A feature for many users is blockchain’s anonymous transactions, which is fine if you just don’t want anyone to know you’re really into collecting rare My Little Pony figurines, but it becomes a problem when that anonymity is used to launder money or for other nefarious ends.

But just because you don’t have to show ID doesn’t mean transactions are really anonymous. Identities can be tracked if you care to look hard enough, Boscovic says: “Blockchain is a rich source of digital information. With the right digital forensic tools, it is relatively easy to link a specific person to their digital identity used to transact on the blockchain.”

The FBI followed that sort of forensic trail after cyber attackers hit the Colonial Pipeline in May 2021, shutting down the American oil-pipeline system and demanding a ransom of 75 bitcoin (about $2.8 million at the time), Boscovic notes. Most of the ransom (63.7 bitcoin) was recovered; the US government in November offered a $10 million bounty for information about DarkSide, the hacking group believed to be responsible.

Of course, as law enforcement becomes more tech-savvy, users will find new ways to cover their electronic trails. The IEEE’s Ramadoss points to blockchains such as Monero and Zcash that were designed with privacy in mind and are much more difficult to trace.

  Eyes on the future

So what does a blockchain future look like? International regulation might not be a part of the puzzle. Ramadoss thinks such agreements might be extremely difficult given the fragmented nature of the global regulatory landscape.

“Crypto regulation varies from country to country,” he says. “Some countries are favorable (Singapore, El Salvador, Ukraine, Malta), some countries are working on a new regulatory framework (European Commission), and some countries outright banned cryptocurrencies (China).”

And ASU’s Boscovic sees no need for international agreements in principle. “Blockchain solutions are international and borderless by their designs,” he says. “Rather, the national regulators will need to interpret and map international blockchain business opportunities onto local business ecosystems and help their economies be competitive in such a global environment.”

  Who’s in the lead?

The experts disagree, however, on which regions are leading the way to a blockchain future. Ramadoss is betting on China (for non-crypto technology), which has been piloting the blockchain-based Digital Yuan project, and the European Union, whose European Commission “is funding the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) to serve as a single platform for issuance of identity, diplomas management, notarization of documents and trusted data sharing among the EU member states.”

SOURCE: International Data Corporation. DEDISN: Anas Albounni, KUST Review

Boscovic, however, puts his money on North America. “It is primarily due to the entrepreneurial spirit of the young generation, its sharp focus on the global economy and easy access to the capital markets. Europe and Singapore are not far behind.”

But both agree that the confusing nature of the technology isn’t a problem at all. Just as most people don’t have to understand exactly why the internet works to use it, blockchain users will access the technology through user-friendly apps, they say. And the blockchain future? When will it finally arrive? “It’s already here,” Boscovic says.